Question

I am designin a new table which has an identity column with int type.The table supposed to have inserts most than 500.000 daily .So how can i avoid the problem of identity field exceeding max value?
my sample table create snippet is below

CREATE TABLE IntegratorQueue(
        ID int PRIMARY KEY IDENTITY(0,1),--IDENTITY,
        RefDetailId UNIQUEIDENTIFIER NOT NULL,
        RefStartDate datetime
        )

thanks

Answer 1

You can use GUID ( UNIQUEIDENTIFIER ) in your table as PK if you dont want to use BIGINT. The Max capacity of the GUID is 2^128.

CREATE TABLE IntegratorQueue(
        ID UNIQUEIDENTIFIER PRIMARY KEY DEFAULT NEWID(),--IDENTITY,
        RefDetailId UNIQUEIDENTIFIER NOT NULL,
        RefStartDate datetime
        )

But if you need to know when will your INT identity exceed the max value you should check before the insert.

    INSERT INTO IntegratorQueue( RefDetailId, RefStartDate )
    VALUES ( NEWID(), GETUTCDATE() )

-- INT capacity (-2,147,483,648) to (2,147,483,647 ) 

    IF 2147483647 - SCOPE_IDENTITY() < 500000
    --... Do something... send an Email ( xp_sendmail. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa260697(v=sql.80).aspx )
    -- Insert Notification records into an another table... 
    -- return with 1, or something else, like the end of your query instead of RETURN 0 RETURN 1 and check this... so on...

Maybe the DBCC CHECKIDENT( tablename, RESEED, currentseed+inserted)